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Do you think the Chromebook Pixel is useless and expensive, despite having one of the best screens ever put on a laptop (plus it doubles as a touchscreen)? Well, look again. Google and Lenovo were smart enough to include the usual bonus unverified BIOS slot that you can go and enable through developer settings — which would then allow you install a different operating system.

Linux is the first to be added by a Googler named Bill Richardson; a Windows 8 modification shouldn’t be too faro ff considering the Pixel uses an Intel Core i5 processor.

This is the work of a true geek: Mike at Total Geekdom,has been constructing a wind tunnel case. Built from a box fan, medium-density fiberboard, lexan and aluminum, the tunnel increases airspeed by about 240 percent and cools its contents with a brisk 9 mph breeze. At full bore, however, the fan churns out air speeds between 26 and 30 mph inside the case’s sweet spot. What’s it cooling off? A PC worthy of some gaming, with an Ivy Bridge 3770K processor, a pair of Radeon 7970 (Sapphire Dual-X) GPUs, 8GB of RAM and a 40GB SSD.

While there’s room for overclocking, it’s still humming at a speedy 4.5GHz with temperatures between 64 and 65 degrees Celsius, and can run its GPUs at 1225MHz with core temperatures at 46 and 56 degrees Celsius.

But this cool computer isn’t being used for games; instead it’s processing time has been donated to cancer research via the World Community Grid. Cool, literally.

Got a Samsung phone? Well, the Koreans at the Big S will have to publish a software update for it, because “Alephzain”, a modder/hacker was able to use it to root his Samsung Galaxy S III. The bad part? It can delete or completely brick your Samsung smartphone, all because it has certain Exynos processors, a key element to using the exploit. It’s working in practice as well (besides malware apps); another user called “Chainfire” has already build an apk that can use the “ExynosAbuse” to root a number of devices including:

Justin Angel, a Nokia engineer working on Windows Phone, has detailed how to compromise Windows 8 games revenue through in-app purchases. Angel highlights the Soulcraft Windows 8 game as an example of how Windows 8 users could potentially edit parts of a game to bypass having to pay for in-app purchases. Basically, it is harder to do than what your normal Windows user does on a day-to-day basis, but as Angel says about breaking the security, “storing encrypted data locally, alongside with the algorithm and the algorithm key/hash is a recipe for security incidents.”

In different instances, he even changed the price of in-game items, after pirating the game. In the name of science. Microsoft is sure to prepare something for this in the coming hours, so things will keep moving.

I love Valve. What game developer would go through the trouble of demonstrating how awesome another developer (in this case, Bethesda) is, by integrating one of their best characters into Skyrim — a core? It is to be the delightful Space Core (it yells, “SPAAAAAAAACE!”), but anyways the idea is that it’s dropped into Tamriel and now you can fly around in it yelling “spaaaaace”. That’s awesome, Valve.

More importantly however is the launch of the Creation Kit for Skyrim, allowing you to search for Skyrim mods, rate them, and upload your own, just like Valve has done. It’s all good with the The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

So, this is rather expected, but exciting. Android 2.2.1 (not 2.3 or Honeycomb folks) has been placed on an HP Touchpad by some Qualcomms dudes, since the Touchpad makes use of a 1.2GHz dual-coreprocessor from that very company. A fully-working build of Froyo is seen running on the video seen after the break, and Qualcomm so far has denied all questions regarding why and how they got the Touchpad to get this running. However in the meantime, there’s a $2100 bounty (and growing) by the HacknMod team for whoever can pull of a perfect Android 2.2.1 port to the Touchpad first — multitouch, sound, camera, and WiFi. Good luck to those involved, and the video of the leaked Qualcomm build can be seen after the break. Via: Reddit

It has only hit “Beta 1″ of its short life, but iOS 5 has been jailbroken by none other than the almighty Dev Team’s “MuscleNerd” on an iPod Touch. At the moment, the jailbreak is of the tethered variety, meaning that it must be connected to a computer to initialize the jailbreak, but that also means this version will never be released to the public. A full jailbreak is currently being worked on so it will launch in time for iOS 5’s release in the fall. Via: Twitter

Fun fact: By changing the PPI (pixel-density) to higher than 170 or so to emulate a smaller screen, you can find that an Android 3.x device will change the default UI to that of a stock (read: Vanilla) Gingerbread UI. It can be done via the LCDDensity for Root app as demonstrated in the video after the break, and if rolled back to 160 pixels-per-inch, reverts back to the default Honeycomb UI. Via: Pocketables